I own a five year old male brown headed parrot that I've owned since he was weaned. This year was my first year of college, and I've been living in the dorms while my mom, dad and brother took care of my bird. I've been back to visit a few times, and Frank (my bird) has done a good job adjusting without me. But I recently leased out a new apartment for the summer and moved my bird in with me in the past three days. I don't have any roommates and it's a fairly quiet neighborhood, but Frank is having a hard time adjusting. He's pretty flinchy and nervous, and he's started grinding the feathers on his crop again. (He doesn't pluck them out, he just chews at the tips so they are jagged on the edges.) I know moving brings a lot of anxiety for some birds, and I've done my best to implement a comfortable routine for him, but I was wondering if there was anything else I can do to make him more comfortable in this new environment. Or anything I should avoid doing, for that matter. He's moved with me once before this, but he didn't have as much as an issue with the last move as much as he has with this one, for whatever reason. Thanks for reading! I'm open to any suggestions you may have.

There are some important bits of information that you haven't provided that may have a bearing on this. How old is your bird? How old was he when you moved to the dorm? And how old was he when you took him back to live with you? Also a Timeline for these events would help to shed some light on what is occurring. Basically, what I am thinking has occurred is that when you went to the dorms your bird may have bonded with another family member, which it is now grieving the loss of. While just the act of moving in itself can be stressful it is much worse for them if they have had enough time to bond with another person. If this is the case all you can do is spend as much time with him as you can and wait it out.

But Wolf is right, the bird stayed in the same house he had been living his entire life and although you were missing, he obviously liked your parents, too, and they were taking good care of him - then you come back and, out of the blue, you take him out of his familiar environment and routine so he is now upset about it (BTW, what he does to his feathers is called 'barbering'). Now, unless you are planning on keeping the apartment and him for the duration and not just the summer, I would suggest you return him to his home and the people who have no become his humans. I am sorry to recommend this to you because, obviously, you feel that he belongs to you but parrots are not like dogs, they don't adjust well at all to changes so any kind of disruption in his life that is meant to be short time is to be avoided with them.

Sorry about missing those, I was on my first cup of coffee. Thank you Pajarita for bringing them to my attention. Parrots have a difficult enough time trying to adjust to changes in environment, but the most difficulty occurs when the bond to a person. They don't understand that their person can go away and come back. When their person goes away they think that that person is dead and they begin the grieving process. This is so stressful that some parrots have been known to not recover from it. This is where my concern for it comes in.

Thanks for the suggestions! My school is close to my home, so since I've been at college, I used to go back and forth to visit him throughout the year. Because I've owned him for his whole life and haven't "cut contact" from him since I left to college, he is still very much bonded to me. It's been a few days since the move and he's now back to his perky old self. I think he just needed to get used to the new place and the change of routine. The barbering has stopped since I purchased a humidifier.

Parrots are not like dogs and occasional visits don't really work to maintain a close relationship. It's not that he doesn't remember you, he does. It's that you are no longer his human because, for that, you have to be there all the time because that is the way they were hard-wired by nature to live from birth to death. But I am happy he seems to be adjusting to the change.... my worry is what is going to happen when you go back to school.